The Unconscious: Bushman (San) trance painting gave me a way in to areas of theunconsciousness. In a significant dream in the mid-1990’s, I saw ancient paintings – figures, animals, shamans – on a wall; but they were not Bushman work, I realised, they were from my ancestors. Waking, I drew them; and explored them over the next months. I still use them.

PORTRAITS: So much of our being is concentrated in the face. We stare, striving to read the person.

I paint faces hungrily, looking at shape, angle, colour.

I risk: I brush on paint without preliminary drawings; adjust; must figure out when to stop.

Here’s the painter, here’s the sitter – and between them, this third thing, the portrait, carrying something of each and of their relationship.

A painting that carries likeness is a gift – and a mystery. (I’m told I capture an uncanny likeness.)

But a good portrait must be more than a likeness – it has to be a vivid painting in its own right.

I do portrait commissions – please contact me.

LOOKING AT PAINTINGS is a vital part of an artist’s education. It shows what is possible with paint. Five of my many masters:

Picasso is an icon: his immediacy and speed; the personal nature, diary-like, of almost everything he did; his energy; his commitment to making.

At an exhibition of Kokoschka’s lithographs at the National Gallery in Cape Town in 1971 I was inspired that marks could be so ragged and yet so right. An inspired portraitist, too.

Edvard Munch and Picasso open up printmaking for me through their curiosity and inventiveness in exploring materials and process. In my relief prints, monoprints and etchings I play with stuff, and problem-solve technical complexities.

Walter Battiss’s work is playful and inventive. He explored many styles and mediums. My simplified figures began in his.

Bill Ainslie’s energetic mark making and trust of process influence me deeply. I studied under him from 1980-85.